So the priest served that little altar, and of a night, when the Queen was minded next day to partake of the host, he heard her confession. On other nights he left them there alone to say their prayers. It was always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at their sides and vanished up into the darkness of the roof. Having done their prayers, sometimes they stayed to converse and to meditate, for there they could be very private. On the night when the letter to Rome was redrafted, the Queen prayed much longer than the Lady Mary, who sat back upon a stool, silently, to await her finishing--for it seemed that the Queen was more zealous for the converting of those realms again to the old faith than was ever the Lady Mary. The tapers burned with a steady, invisible glow in the little side chapel behind the pillar; the altar gleamed duskily before them, and it was so still that through the unglassed windows they could hear, from far below in the black countryside, a tenuous bleating of late-dropped lambs. Katharine Howard's beads clicked and her dress rustled as she came up from her knees. 'It rests more with thee than with any other in this land,' her voice reverberated amongst the distant shadows. A bat that had been drawn in by the light flittered invisibly near them. 'Even what?' the Lady Mary asked. 'Well you know,' the Queen answered; 'and may the God to whom you have prayed, that softened the heart of Paul, soften thine in this hour!' The Lady Mary maintained a long silence. The bat flittered, with a leathern rustle, invisible, between their very faces. At last Mary uttered, and her voice was taunting and malicious-- 'If you will soften my heart much you must beseech me.' 'Why, I will kneel to you,' the Queen said. 'Aye, you shall,' Mary answered. 'Tell me what you would have of me.' 'Well you know!' Katharine said again. In the darkness the lady's voice maintained its bitter mirth, as it were the broken laughter of a soul in anguish. 'I will have you tell me, for it is a shameful tale that will shame you in the telling.' The Queen paused to consider of her words. 'First, you shall be reconciled with, and speak pleasantly with, the King your father and my lord.' 'And is it not a shameful thing you bid me do, to bid me speak pleasant words to him that slew my mother and called me bastard?' The Queen answered that she asked it in the name of Christ, His pitiful sake, and for the good of this suffering land. 'None the less, Queen, thou askest it in the darkness that thy face may not be seen. And what more askest thou?'